Job evaluation is a systematic process of assessing the value of jobs to determine the compensation to be paid to employees performing those jobs.
The purpose of a job evaluation is to ensure that employees are paid fairly, equitably, and competitively. And a key aspect of any employee pay decision is to also consider the employer’s budget.
The job evaluation is based on the job description and the organization chart that provides details on the reporting relationships as well as the number and type of direct reports and their jobs.
Have you ever looked at an org chart and thought, “There are a lot of people managers and not very many individual contributors.” In other words, it is top heavy. There are a lot of managers and not many doers or individual contributors (ICs).
And as you read the job descriptions for ALL the jobs on the org chart you realize that you have a lot of “high level” ICs with 1 – 2 direct reports. And these IC jobs have inflated Manager, Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, and Vice President job titles.
Then you look at the salary survey jobs used in the market pricing of the employer jobs. You realize that the people manager matches are too high for the work described in the job description. It looks like the employer jobs were market priced based on job title and not the job’s responsibilities.
After your internal voice says, “What the fork is this!?” You must decide if this is the hill you want to die on.
For those of you who have found yourself in this scenario, you know it can take years to rematch employer jobs and influence the organization’s leaders and others in HR to understand your point of view.
At the end of the day, you want to pay employees enough but not too little and not too much. And when you over level jobs during the job evaluation process, you aren’t doing the employer or employees any favors.
You may avoid difficult conversations now, but in the long run it will cause pain you could have avoided.
Sadly, these scenarios are all too common. Especially, if your HR team members doing job evaluations don’t know how to choose the right job level and match from the salary surveys.
Sometimes the easiest way to fix this is to have an external consultant partner with you on the rematching of the employer jobs and releveling. Their status as a consultant may also help you with the internal stakeholder buy-in that is essential to making the changes sustainable.
My team and I are good at cleaning up messes.
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